Deepening the conversation on identity

Posted February 28, 2005; 01:35 p.m.

by Karin Dienst

Growing up in Ghana, studying in England and working in
the United States, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has shaped a life
and a body of work that crisscrosses boundaries and re-imagines the
idea of identity. Through an examination of the notions revolving
around individuality and universality, he asks us to reconsider what it
means to make a life of our own while being responsive to the needs of
others.

Appiah described his latest book, “The Ethics of
Identity,” published in January by Princeton University Press, as “one
philosopher’s reflections on issues that have been important in his own
life.” He draws on his own experience and the work of thinkers through
the centuries and across the globe to raise questions about how we
define ourselves. Intensely absorbed by such issues, Appiah already is
working on a follow-up to the book, which he said will “take up some of
the questions about cosmopolitanism” — what it means to be citizens of
the world — “in a less academic way.”

The
Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the
University Center for Human Values, Appiah is an internationally
renowned scholar of moral and political philosophy, African and
African-American studies, and issues of personal and political
identity, multiculturalism and nationalism. His importance as a thinker
is evident in the attention his work garners — for example, he was
named one of 25 great “public philosophers” in the world today in the
Dec. 29, 2004, issue of the French news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur.

Appiah’s
writings include numerous scholarly books, essays and articles along
with reviews, short fiction, three novels, poetry and an annotated
collection of proverbs from Ashanti, Ghana, on which he collaborated
with his mother. He is the author of the award-winning “Color
Conscious: The Political Morality of Race” (with Amy Gutmann) and “In
My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture.” He is also
co-editor, with Henry Louis Gates Jr., of “Africana: The Encyclopedia
of the African and African-American Experience,” a revised version of
which is due to be published by Oxford University Press in March.

Just
as he likes to write for a variety of readers, Appiah said he enjoys
teaching students at all academic levels, from freshmen to doctoral
candidates. Since joining the Princeton faculty in 2002, he has taught
courses on individuality as an ideal, metaphysics and epistemology,
political philosophy and philosophical problems of race and racism.

Appiah
came to Princeton from Harvard, where he had been on the faculty since
1991. He also has held positions at Duke, Cornell and Yale
universities. He received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees
from Cambridge University.

In an interview
with the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, Appiah discussed his new book, his
role as a writer and teacher, and the meaning of an ethical life.

In a world with so many wants and so much suffering, how
can we strike a balance between the needs of our own individuality and
our responsibilities toward others?

This is
an absolutely crucial issue: I’m writing about this right now in my
next book. But I hope the outline of the answer is in “The Ethics of
Identity.”

There are certain basic resources
to which every human being is entitled, in virtue, in part, of their
dignity as persons. They are the resources that each person needs to
make a dignified life, to pursue the individuality to which we are all
entitled. We owe it to each other to make sure that everyone on the
planet has these basic resources, and we are clearly far from having
achieved that. Until we do, there is, I think, a moral stain on the
achievements of each of us who has
been granted those resources and more. Part of the reason we do so much
less about this than we should, I think, is the power of national and
more local identities to blind us to the significance of the suffering
of strangers. So identity has a dark side.

But
another part of the answer is that the solution isn’t really to be
found in individual acts but in a systematic restructuring of the
global community, which is something that can only be achieved by
politics, by acting in communities. Faced with the great number of
people in the world whose lives I could lift above the baseline, I feel
powerless. What’s the point, I think, of my drop in the ocean? Of
course the answer is, “One life is significantly aided,” but it’s hard
to focus on this. If we act together, however, to reform national
foreign policy and aid and trade policy, and to work with the large
international NGOs — CARE, Oxfam, Save the Children, Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch — then we can hope for large-scale
substantive change. It’s a key part of my claim about individuality
that living an ethically successful life requires that we do what is
morally required of us to a significant degree.

You
say that a liberal attitude should involve tolerance and
open-mindedness. Do you think these values are gaining or losing ground?

I
think we are committed to toleration, but not without limit. There are
fundamental values we cannot step back from: respect for the
individuality and the dignity of each person, for example. And again
with open-mindedness, I think it’s crucial to understand that
recognizing that we might be wrong and that we have much to learn from
others doesn’t mean that we don’t care about the truth. It’s because we can’t be sure that we have the truth and other people are mistaken, that we need to be open to those others.

My
hunch is that there’s probably been a net growth of these attitudes
globally over my lifetime; but there are clearly places and people who
are increasingly actively illiberal in this sense. I think that it is
clear that there are many so-called religious fundamentalists who lack
the spirit of toleration (even though modern Western toleration was
developed as a religious attitude in the first place). But there are
plenty of scientifically minded Westerners who lack the kind of
intellectual modesty that seems to me the most sensible response to our
situation as limited, fallible knowers. Overconfidence is a widespread
human failing; that’s one reason I like to teach introductory
epistemology!

Your conception of
cosmopolitanism — being “citizens of the world” — emphasizes
conversation. How do we learn to have such conversations and how do
they happen?

I think that, for educated
people, the beginnings of conversations across boundaries of identity —
whether it be national, religious or something else — come with the
sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a
movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than
your own. So I’m using the word “conversation” not only for literal
talk, but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and
ideas of others. And I stress the role of the imagination here — and
the role of the sorts of encounters that are central to the humanities
— because it’s crucial, I think, that these encounters be undertaken
not just because they make it more likely that we can live together in
peace, but because the encounters, properly conducted, are valuable in
themselves.

And that’s another element of
the metaphor of conversation: Conversation allows us to understand
others, teaches us things, but it’s also a pleasure. If you try to
persuade people to engage in conversation across societies as a kind of
necessary drudgery, they won’t take it up in the right spirit — they
probably won’t take it up at all. So cosmopolitanism, in short, has to
be defended as a delight, not as a duty.

You
write that each of us creates a life by “interpreting the materials
that history has given us.” How have the “materials” in your life
shaped you into becoming a teacher and a writer, among many other
things?

I think that teaching is central to my life for two major reasons.

One
is that my faith as a humanist is that the things we study are worthy
objects of human attention and that part of what is most worthwhile in
our civilizations is that we pass on these objects — literature, the
arts, philosophy — and ways of understanding them from one generation
to the next. I was privileged, as so many modern people are, to have
some of them made available to me through an education I enjoyed at the
time and am grateful for every day. That’s why I write not just in
scholarly venues but also, when I’m invited to, for that curious
audience: the educated public.

And the
second is that through teaching I learn; I learn all the time. So it’s
as much for my sake as for the sake of my students (perhaps, even, more
for my sake, I don’t know!) that I teach. Trying to communicate to
smart young people, who are willing to learn but who have not yet
mastered these traditions, simply enriches my understanding of my
subject. Every year some undergraduate asks me a question or makes a
suggestion that revises my understanding.

I
have to say, too, that my mother — who is both a novelist and
children’s writer and a painter and well-known expert on the art of
Ashanti, where I grew up — raised us with a great love for literature
and the arts. I write as much as anything because I enjoy writing; and
I enjoy it, I am sure, in part because I grew up around books. My
mother used to read the English Romantic poets to us; she encouraged us
to write poetry; she wrote it herself. When I came home from school for
the holidays she had put out by my bed novels that she had enjoyed and
thought I would enjoy. D.H. Lawrence, Tolstoy, Chinua Achebe; but also
mystery novels, and contemporary comic fiction. In other words, not all
heavy canonical stuff!

As for my
cosmopolitanism, that I owe to my family, too. How else to explain that
I have a Norwegian and a Nigerian brother-in-law, Lebanese and Kenyan
cousins, except by the fact that my English and Ghanaian families (and
their Norwegian and Nigerian ones) were open to the world?

The
college years tend to be formative ones for young adults, when
questions of individuality, identity and future goals have great play.
With your philosophical training and your many years of experience on
college campuses, what can you say is at stake for students in these
years?

I’ve taught freshman seminars on
these topics since I’ve been at Princeton, and they were among the most
rewarding intellectual experiences of my life. The students take these
questions seriously and are willing to work through difficult novels
and hard philosophical texts in order to think about them.

It’s
one of the things that I’m proudest of in our American educational
system: that we believe so passionately in the ideal of a liberal
education — an education that provides you with tools for the
development of your individuality, not just with preparation for a
career; that requires that you have the intellectual tools to think
about the choices you have to make and the knowledge to understand the
natural and social worlds we live in. Having that knowledge isn’t just
an instrument in making choices or in managing your life, it’s also
something of great intrinsic value. Which is why I think that a good
appreciation of the social and natural sciences — their methods and
some of their central theories — is as crucial to the liberal education
of a novelist or a lawyer as it obviously is for someone who is going
to make a career in science, pure or applied.

The
study of ethical issues for Princeton undergraduates continues to
expand, and students are required to study “ethical thought and moral
values.” How much presence do you think the study of ethics should have
in the undergraduate curriculum? How might students be made open to the
notion of, or even prepare for, an ethical life?

I would like to say two things about the role of ethics in a liberal education.

One
is that I don’t think teaching morality or ethics in the classroom is
going to stop people from doing bad things. Every time we have the sort
of moral panic brought on by the Enron fiasco and the suite of
accounting and business scandals that followed, people say we should be
teaching more ethics. Well, I don’t think that more moral philosophy in
the business schools is going to help there.

What
we need are laws and regulations and effective oversight; and we need,
I think, as well, a culture that respects more in business achievement
than the bottom line. Because mostly when people do what’s wrong in
these cases, it isn’t because they don’t know that it’s wrong. It’s
simply that they are tempted by the profits and they think they can get
away with it.

Theory is hugely important in
moral life, because when we have big choices to make, we need to be
able to frame them conceptually somehow, to talk ourselves and others
through them. But it’s only part of the story. To put it crudely: the
Good Samaritan was responding as much with his heart as with his mind,
and classrooms are not a good place to change hearts. A lot of the
education of the heart that goes on in college happens outside the
classroom — as people interact with people from different backgrounds
in common activities, sports, clubs, working together on problem sets,
discussing with friends, agonizing about love. That’s a crucial part of
ethical education, too.

The second thing I’d
like to say, which is implicit in what I just said about a liberal
education, is that preparation for an ethical life comes from every
area of the curriculum, even if in different ways. An ethical life is,
among other things, a life in which knowledge and understanding have a
place; it’s a life in which you take your civic responsibilities
seriously, which means having some sense of what’s at stake in the
economic life of your society and the world.

The
role of those of us in the normative disciplines is not, in my
judgment, to tell people what the right answers are to the ethical
questions: it’s to provide them with the tools for thinking about them
themselves. I have strong views about politics; but I’m not trying to
persuade students of any particular policy line. I’m hoping they’ll
learn something from me about how to make up their own minds.